Multi-tasking in desktop applications is quite common, in which a user may open several child windows to view and operate different objects in the main window of the same program. As for mobile applications, however, this is quite another story. An ever-decreasing size of mobile devices often limits contents that may be displayed on the screen, so that different objects or views may hardly be shown together. Due to this limitation, mobile applications often use a certain navigation sequence among different views or function modules.
Furthermore, navigation between different views or function modules often discards intermediate data in between navigation. For example, in the case of online purchasing, the user often loses the entered information when switching back to a history view window or to another function module. In this example, the user usually spends a lot of time re-entering lost information and completing even a simple online purchasing order.
For mobile applications with more complicated functions, this problem may be worse, since the history of view navigation sequence can be deeper. For example, this disadvantage of mobile applications is more critical for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, because the ERP systems usually have many functionalities and the operation sequence is also complex.